We’re in earnings season now and so we’ll likely have company results to comment on for a couple more weeks. Monday is a good day to consider the broader trends that were crowded out last week by news, particularly news of a financial nature, so that’s what I’ll do today. One thing that’s developing at…
Can Microsoft Find the Cloud’s Silver Lining?
Microsoft reported its earnings, and other than some weakness in entertainment, the numbers beat the estimates. The PC-software giant showed strength in business sales overall (where market growth was more than double the consumer space) and of course its Windows franchise still works (though not as well as before) even in the consumer laptop space. …
Nokia Slips but Tech Hangs On
We had a number of interesting earnings reports today, so let’s get to it! Nokia’s numbers for the last quarter were awful, with smartphone sales falling sharply. You can’t blame that completely on the Windows Phone decision, but it darn sure didn’t help and it’s not going to help them in 2012 either. The question…
IBM and Intel Report: What Does it Mean?
We now have some of the major tech leaders reporting with IBM’s and Intel’s quarterly calls, but I still don’t have quite enough to make a definitive comment on how tech will do for the quarter. I do think there are some interesting points in both the IBM and Intel reports, though, and they at…
Reading Cisco’s OpenFlow Blog Tea Leaves
Cisco, one of the vendors we’ve been watching on the path toward what we think is the critical symbiosis of the cloud and OpenFlow/SDN, has blogged (http://blogs.cisco.com/news/is-it-just-sdn/) about their view of the subject. I’m happy they did, but I confess to being a little confused by what they said. It seems that Cisco is arguing…
Reading the Facebook and Google Moves
Facebook’s double buy of mobile-related companies raises a couple of interesting questions, obviously related to motive and future direction for the social-net giant. While the deal for mobile photo-app player Instagram caught everyone’s attention on price (a billion), it takes at two points to define a line, and to guess where the line might lead. …
Google: Do New Evil or Do New Things?
Google is making news, again, for its left-of-center management practices. The company turned in an exceptionally good quarter that beat estimates handily, and at the same time it announced it would be doing a 2:1 stock split but one that created only non-voting shares. The goal, obviously and as the company admitted, was to prevent…
HP and IBM Duel for the “New Cloud”
Whatever you want to call it, we’re having a revolution in IT. HP’s announcement of a cloud-friendly architecture to build data centers, one that includes prefabricated provisioning tools, was mirrored in many ways by the IBM PureSystems launch yesterday. I think IBM is right in that the new wave is the most important thing in…
Taking Tech Temperature, Pre-Earnings.
Euphonic, huh? Well, earnings season is about to take off, which means we’ll likely have more financial results to review than tech bombshells. Some companies are working to get their stuff out before they go quiet in their pre-earnings period, though, and one of them is HP. After seeming to ignore the cloud, they now…
Can Two Halves Make a Whole, Service-Layer-Wise?
I’m seeing some progress (perhaps, at least) in the evolution of a logical structure for operator-hosted OTT services. One startup, UXP Systems, has created a kind of shim layer that orchestrates and manages the OTT form of a number of operator services, including voice, messaging, and video. The idea is to provide componentized, orchestrable, services…